I’m pleased to announce that for the first time, HSQBRank will be naming All-World Teams. These teams will recognize the best individual players in high school quiz bowl for the 2014-2015.

Ten people will be announced to the All-World First Team. Ten more will be named to the All-World Second Team. The existence of Honorable Mentions has not been determined at this time. The teams will be announced in May.

I will be naming the teams myself, though this is not so much solely derived from statistics like the rankings would be.

I finally have caught up on the past couple of months of tournaments, and have updated the rankings. The next update will come in March, with updated set adjustments.

UPDATE: I corrected a few errors in terms of states (I will eventually one day get my way and Scarsdale will move to New Jersey by sheer force of will). I also removed the pseudonymous DEEP GREEN from the listings since it was a duplicate.

I was finally able to calculate new adjustments for a couple of sets this year – specifically, Maryland Spring, ACF Fall and the current HSAPQ set.

Teams whose ranking statistically depended on ACF Fall for their rankings mostly stayed the same – the changes were fairly minor.
Teams whose ranking depended on Maryland Spring tended to move up the rankings, because as of now the Maryland Spring set grades out as about the same difficulty as ACF Fall.
Teams whose ranking depended on the HSAPQ set tended to move down the rankings, as so far that set grades out as noticeably easier than last year’s HSAPQ efforts.

Additionally, some teams from Ohio that were originally credited as having played FKT had that changed to a NAQT A set to reflect reality. This resulted in teams’ adjusted aPPBs dropping, since A sets grade out as much easier than FKT. This caused some teams, like Tippecanoe, to fall out of the rankings.

We’re still ranking 100 teams. I don’t know if this is going to expand this calendar year, but I expect to be at 200 ranked high school teams by March, if not earlier.

In addition to the Singapore American School, which put on another strong performance, Shanghai American School of Puxi debuts in the rankings at 81. Colonel By remains in the top 10. I don’t know if I’ve pointed this out before, but I’m pretty sure this is the first time that a team outside the U.S. has been in the top 10.

Also, the current top 11 represents 11 different states/provinces, which is pretty neat. I don’t know if this is the first time we’ve had two teams in the top 100 from Oklahoma, but I don’t think that’s happened much before.

Teams that I’m sure are making their top 100 debuts are Hingham and West-Windsor Plainsboro South (what a name!)

Finally, this looks like it will almost certainly be the first year the top team in New York will not be Hunter College High School. Hunter remains solid, but Bethlehem Central is off to a great start, with Great Neck South and Ithaca not too far behind.Continue reading →

This is the first set of rankings to more or less ignore preseason projections (excluding teams who have good projections but have yet to play a tournament). This accounts for a lot of the movement, though quite a few good ACF Fall performances have an impact here too.

We’re still using last year’s adjustments; hopefully by the time December ends, I’ll have enough information to move beyond using them.